Web-based team collaboration services allow teams to create sites that may be accessed by team members for information sharing and document collaboration. The online collaboration is aimed at helping increase individual and team productivity.
Generally, collaboration system user interfaces are delivered almost exclusively as HTML within a browser to team members. For example, collaborative data may be presented as lists or tables of data to users in the form of simple HTML tables. Performing operations on the collaboration data (e.g. sorting, filtering, adding, changing, and deleting) is time consuming and difficult. This is for a number of reasons. One reason is that HTML by its very nature is not very interactive. Each operation needs one or more trips back to the collaboration server to access the data and to complete the operation. Users are reluctant to make changes to data when it is so time consuming and painstaking.